All the Lonely People_Collected Stories by Barry Callaghan & Margaret Atwood

Author:Barry Callaghan & Margaret Atwood [Callaghan, Barry & Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07KY7VMJ9
Publisher: Exile Editions
Published: 2018-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

ANYBODY HOME?

Leonard Cholet was a lean old doctor in his late seventies who had dyed black hair and a domed forehead. He wore loose, double-breasted suits with padded shoulders. He unbuttoned my shirt, tapping my chest, listening to my heart. “To you,” he said, “a pounding heart is a problem. To me, a long time ago a heart murmur was more than I could hope for.” Unopened envelopes cluttered his desk. I could feel his breath on my cheek. He tapped again. “Anybody home?” and the doctor laughed, saying, “Don’t listen to me. I talk because there’s nothing else to do at my age. You should listen to your own heart, eh? How’s that for a little truth, except most people nowadays try to think with their head instead of their heart.”

He had a perfectly pressed three-point white handkerchief in his breast pocket. The old floor creaked as he walked back and forth. I closed my eyes. For a moment there was silence. I lifted my hands. “What you got there?” he said. I opened my eyes and looked around. “Where?” He laughed. “Between your hands. You look like you’re holding something.” I shook my head. “Memories maybe?” he said. “I got memories. Memories are made of what you’re looking at. Me, what I hold onto.” He took a flat wooden stick and his stainless-steel pencil-light. “Open your mouth. I got to look inside. You’re tense, you know that. For a guy that looks so calm you’re very tense.” I closed my eyes again, listening to his creaking floor, creaking footsteps, my own footsteps last night as I crossed her parquet floors, the walls white and the floors loose from dampness and there was only a tubular table holding the TV in the room, “And say aah,” the old doctor said, dampness from it being in the basement, “Aah,” and the white plastic padded headboard, foam-filled pillows, and she sighed, lay back and sighed so luxuriously, slate eyes, breasts lolling to the side, hips narrow, and small delicate feet, discreet little cries like being half-ashamed, “Ahh,” and then blowing smoke, saying that at home around the house she liked to wear a Blue Jays ball cap when she hunkered up late at night doing her nails, hummed out of her skull, she said, by evangelical television shows, and she always slept till about ten, sleeping healthy, she said, “Look, no stress marks, that’s the selfsame pure skin I was a born baby with.”

“But the only link,” Cholet said, “with those years after the war – you hear what I’m saying – is my son, who’s now like a big boot. With a hole in it. There’s nothing wrong with your throat, but with him and his heart, there’s something wrong. See, he likes to wear those yellow construction-worker boots with little steel clips on the toes. Me, I keep to my slippers with the sponge soles and my room with the lamplight like a small escape hole in the darkness. But for him, the way I look at it, it was a mistake my making a marriage, a man like me.

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